by David Milne
On March 31, France and Britain, finally conceding the failure of their appeasement of Hitler, pledged their full support for an independent Poland, which by now was hemmed in by Nazi Germany to the west and Stalin’s Soviet Union to the east. Britain further solidified its commitments when it signed an Anglo-Polish military alliance in August, which Chamberlain promised to honor. A few years too late, a line had finally been drawn in the sand, not that its permanence much convinced Hitler, who had reason to doubt that Britain would risk war over Poland. A million and a half battle-ready German troops flooded across the Polish border on September 1, exactly one week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This pact of convenience between two of the twentieth century’s worst mass murderers promised nonaggression between Germany and the Soviet Union as their armies feasted on Polish territory, visiting hellish destruction as they went. Holding true to their word this time, Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. Conditioned to Anglo-French pliability, Hitler was genuinely surprised when he received the news.
With such audacity and brutality did Adolf Hitler destroy almost all that had been drawn up by Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau in Paris. In fact, Hitler could even claim to be following the logic of ethnic self-determination—he was gathering all German peoples under the benign control of the Third Reich. Totalitarian governments in Japan, Germany, and Italy were taking what they believed was rightfully theirs, and the rest of the world—with Britain and France sharing most of the blame—seemed to lack the will and ability to stop them. A strong, unified Anglo-French response to these Versailles transgressions might have halted his momentum, shattering the cult of personality he and his propagandists so capably developed, and encouraging his opponents to launch a coup of the type that Hitler had tried in Munich in 1923 and Berlin in 1933.
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The parameters of President Roosevelt’s response to these harrowing geopolitical events were circumscribed by the isolationist tenor of the times, which Beard, through his voluminous writings in national newspapers and magazines, helped in small part to create. In 1934, however, it was H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen’s sensational Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armaments Industry that truly captured the public’s imagination. A national bestseller, widely circulated by the influential Book-of-the-Month Club, Merchants of Death argued that the armaments industry played a major role in bringing the world to war in 1914 and provoking American participation three years later. Responding to the apparent plausibility of some of the claims, and the furor they created, Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota led a congressional investigation charged with establishing the true origins of the First World War. Nye offered dramatic and incendiary conclusions, laying blame at the feet of reckless, internationalist American banks—whose interests were dangerously intertwined with those of the arms industry—that extended credits to Britain and France that could be redeemed only if Germany and its allies were defeated. The Nye Committee’s findings were published at the beginning of 1935 and soon began to exert significant influence on congressional and public opinion. A 1936 straw poll revealed that 95 percent of Americans opposed participation in any future war with Hitler’s Germany. Roosevelt understood that he confronted “a public psychology of long standing—a psychology which comes very close to saying ‘peace at any price.’”103
Congress passed three major neutrality acts with sweeping majorities. The first, passed in 1935—as Mussolini prepared to attack Abyssinia—required that during a state of war the U.S. should impose an arms embargo on all belligerents and warned Americans against traveling on belligerent-owned ships. The second neutrality act was passed in February 1936. Taking its direct cue from the Nye Committee, it prohibited war loans and credits for belligerents. The third act, passed in May 1937, renewed the earlier restrictions and made American travel on belligerent ships unlawful, rather than simply cautioning Americans against it. The rationale behind all these acts was clear: an isolationist congressional majority wanted to foreclose to Roosevelt all the maneuvers that Wilson allegedly deployed in bringing the United States into war in 1917. On a visit to the United States, the sister of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain described her host nation as “hardly a people to go tiger shooting with.”104
It was Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, and fear that a resurgent Congress, if not contained, could derail Roosevelt’s broad political agenda, that convinced the president to reassert authority and lead public opinion with a major speech on international affairs. As the New Deal faltered in the face of renewed recession, and FDR’s efforts to pack the Supreme Court with sympathetic justices ran into an almighty political/judicial roadblock, Secretary of State Cordell Hull recalled that in this context of political crisis he “was becoming increasingly worried over the growth of isolationist sentiment in the United States.” He urged the president to challenge his tormentors in Congress and in the media by delivering a major speech on the efficacy of “international cooperation in the course of his journey.” Roosevelt agreed to Hull’s request and delivered an address in Chicago on October 5, 1937—the famous “Quarantine Speech.”105
Hundreds of thousands of people thronged the sidewalks, framing the president’s leisurely route through Chicago, desperate to catch a glimpse of a leader still viewed as a potential savior. In a powerful speech, FDR referred directly to the wars raging in China and Spain, observing that world civilization was threatened by the terror that authoritarian regimes were visiting upon the earth. He attacked those well-intentioned but dangerous idealists who argued that America’s comfortable perch in the western hemisphere was distant enough from the world’s travails to avoid involvement and attack. It was a remarkable speech that exerted a profound influence on the future course of world affairs:
The peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy, instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality … When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease … We are adopting such measures as will minimize our risk of involvement, but we cannot have complete protection in a world of disorder in which confidence and security have broken down.106
The crowd’s response was ecstatic. On the train back to Washington, the president, seeking further affirmation, asked his secretary, “How did it go, Grace?” When she nodded appreciatively, Roosevelt mused, “Well, it’s done now. It was something that needed saying.”107 While it might have needed saying, it also provoked a backlash. As news of Roosevelt’s speech reached Washington, D.C., Congressmen Hamilton Fish and George Tinkham called for the president’s impeachment. Cordell Hull recalled that the “reaction against the quarantine idea was quick and violent. As I saw it, this had the effect of setting back for at least six months our constant educational campaign intended to create and strengthen public opinion toward international cooperation.”108 FDR’s line in the sand had been drawn as quickly as his political survival permitted.
In January 1938, Congressman Louis A. Ludlow sponsored a constitutional amendment that would have required a national referendum on the declaration of war, except in the event of a direct military attack on American territory. This proposal was defeated in the House by 209 votes to 188. Sensing that momentum was now on his side, Roosevelt requested a substantial increase in military preparedness expenditure, which was duly authorized. Through 1939, FDR grew bold enough to challenge the neutrality laws. After Germany’s invasion of Poland, a fourth neutrality act was passed, which repealed the blunt-instrument nature of the three that preceded it. Passed in November 1939, the fourth act allowed belligerent nations (meaning all those that opposed Hitler) to purchase American arms on a cash-and-carry basis—a lifeline that Britain and France grasped as long
as financial reserves permitted. On May 10—a day that was auspicious only in the sense that Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister—Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. The defensive Maginot Line, in which French hopes were mainly vested, was outflanked, and one by one, in rapid succession, each nation fell to the German blitzkrieg within five weeks. Paris fell to the Germans on June 14. The British Empire was the only force that remained to thwart Hitler’s ambitions, and it desperately needed American supplies. But how could America supply a nation that couldn’t afford its wares?
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Beard was relaxed about Japan’s acquisitive ambitions in its Pacific backyard. In a speech delivered at the University of Southern California, one week after the establishment of Manchukuo in 1931, Beard observed that Japanese expansionism was the natural outgrowth of a system in which the navy and army operate outside the reach of civilian authority and are accorded too much institutional respect. He further cautioned that what Japan did to China was of no real concern to the United States, occupied as it was with defending its “continental heritage” in arduous economic circumstances.109 He despaired of the internationalist rationale presented by Walter Lippmann in 1933, who argued that “this damnable crisis is international whether we like it or not … It is international in spite of all prejudices, preferences, and wishes to the contrary, and the man who tries to act as if it weren’t is trying to put out a great fire with one bucket of water.”110 Beard believed that Lippmann was wrong, and the public opinion he so disparaged would present the strongest bulwark against internationalist-led expansionism: “With much twisting and turning the American people are renewing the [George] Washington tradition and repudiating both the Kiplingesque imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt and the universal philanthropy of Woodrow Wilson.”111 But the public still had to be on their guard. Beard strongly suspected that President Roosevelt was seeking participation in a foreign war to deflect attention from continued depression at home. “The Jeffersonian party gave the nation the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and its participation in the World War,” Beard wrote in February 1935. “The Pacific War awaits.”112
Following Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, Beard turned fire on those observers sanctimonious enough to pin the label of “good” or “bad” on Italian actions, and who recklessly “employ the risk of war to prevent war” in fidelity to such distinctions.113 In an asymmetric war that pitted the narcissistic, bellicose Benito Mussolini against the noble, diminutive Haile Selassie, Beard’s denigration of the good-bad dichotomy seems difficult to fathom, let alone agree with. But his broad motivation—to avoid American entanglement in a larger war precipitated by Italy’s interest in a godforsaken part of a godforsaken continent—is clear enough. Following this line of reasoning, in September 1937 Beard observed that Roosevelt, ill-advisedly emulating Woodrow Wilson, was still following “the creed that the United States must do good all around the world.”114
Beard nonetheless was plotting a difficult path between his obvious distaste for Japan, Italy, and Germany, and his desire to undermine America’s stake in forestalling their advance. His sense of comradeship with progressives and socialists elsewhere was still clearly present. Beard supported, for example, supplying the “Loyalist” Popular Front in Spain with American weaponry and munitions—it was clearly a moral good that Franco’s insurrection be defeated. Following Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, Beard penned a perceptive, morally informed critique of what Japan, Italy, and Germany had wrought, and what this portended:
By their faith in force … Hitler and Mussolini are more or less beyond the reach of the old-fashioned calculations. Japanese militarists belong in the same emotional category. Having a philosophy of history in which “anything may happen,” the directors of these three groups may fling prudence to the winds and make the experiment [of aggressive war], or without any deliberate intention or open declarations, the great powers may find themselves at war in the midst of a dissolving civilization.115
But then in February 1938, fearing that the brutality of Japanese actions in China might permit FDR to convince Americans of a phantom stake in East Asia, Beard presented a stark choice between privileging the fates of exotic peoples thousands of miles away and privileging American development itself:
It is easy to get into a great moral passion over the distant Chinese. It costs nothing much now, though it may cost the blood of countless American boys. It involves no conflict with greedy interests in our own midst. It sounds well on Sunday … [But] anybody who feels hot with morals and is affected with delicate sensibilities can find enough to do at home, considering the misery of the 10,000,000 unemployed, the tramps, the beggars, the sharecroppers, tenants and field hands right here at our door.116
While it was difficult for Beard to reconcile his contempt for Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo with his belief that America was best advised to tend to its own Edenic garden, the latter strain in his thinking became dominant with FDR’s Quarantine Speech, which he believed portended disaster. Responding to the self-serving support extended to the president by Earl Browder, general secretary of the American Communist Party, Beard wondered of the speech: “How can we have the effrontery to assume that we can solve the problems of Asia and Europe, encrusted in the blood-rust of fifty centuries? Really, little boys and girls, how can we?”117 Called to testify before the House of Representatives on February 9, 1938, Beard decried FDR’s “policy of quarantine” as necessarily requiring “big battleships to be used in aggressive warfare in the Far Pacific or the Far Atlantic.” He also cast scorn on those sensationalists who entertained the possibility of the “fascist goblins of Europe … marching across the Atlantic to Brazil … [This was] the kind of nightmare which a holder of shipbuilding stocks had when ordinary business is bad … the new racket created to herd the American people into Roosevelt’s quarantine camp.”118
A convenient way to dance around any residual discomfort about Japanese, German, and Italian transgressions was to blame Britain and France for inviting this mess with their irresolution—which Beard did relentlessly. Having seen the nation close-up during his time at Oxford, Beard had mixed feelings toward Britain. He admired its orderly society and myriad political and cultural achievements, but he despised its class system and its empire. Reviewing an anti-British polemic penned by Quincy Howe, titled England Expects Every American to Do His Duty, Beard agreed wholeheartedly with the author’s central contention that America should let its elderly colonial parent fight its own battles, which were invariably waged in defense of its own interests. But clear commonalities in language, economics, and cultural traditions assured “that even blind isolationists must recognize this fact in all their thought about practice.”119 For all that, Beard believed that Britain should face down Hitler and Mussolini alone—or with any help that France could muster. In early 1939, Beard advised that Paris and London should “call [Hitler’s] bluff and stop the peril within forty-eight hours. They can establish solidarity, if that is their real and secret wish. They have the men, the materials, the money, and the power.”120 Here, Beard was overestimating Anglo-French capabilities and underestimating those of the German Wehrmacht. But he was far from alone in misdiagnosing the European military balance in the late 1930s.
Where Beard was prescient was in comprehending the horrific threat posed by Hitler’s warped sensibilities. In Foreign Affairs in 1936, he wrote that Mein Kampf should be taken at face value, that “no other book approaches in authority this sacred text.” He also formed some general sense of what Hitler’s accession meant for Germany’s Jewish population—“Jews are condemned in language unprintable. They are to be driven to the Ghetto or out of Germany”—and nailed with unerring accuracy Hitler’s expansionist design: “Turned in upon themselves, nourishing deep resentments, and lashed to fury by a militant system of education, the German people are conditioned for that day when Hitler, his technicians and his army, are ready and are reasonably sure of the prospects
of success in a sudden and devastating attack, East or West.”121
One thing that Beard could not be accused of was underestimating Hitler. Yet in 1939, in contrast to his earlier advocacy of Britain stiffening its resolve, he weclomed continued equivocation. On May 20, the radical journalist H. L. Mencken wrote to Beard that “if the danger of war passes it certainly won’t be Roosevelt’s fault. He had done his best to encourage an unyielding spirit in England.” Beard replied, “I fear that you are right as to our being served up for the next crusade … Let us hope that the wild men in Europe manage to bluff one another cold … and thus grant us a little respite.” To Beard’s credit, a year later—as Britain’s fate as an independent nation was contested in the skies above—he chastised Mencken for suggesting in an article that “there is not the slightest evidence that the Totalitarian Powers … have been planning any attack on this country.” Beard responded that “the statement is right—there is not the slightest evidence—in the sense that we do not know what they are doing in this respect, if anything. But there are grounds for suspicion … I am for staying out of this mess in Europe, but experience and prudence, coupled with the pains of an oft-singed tail, suggest to me that we keep our powder dry and our neck well in.” Backing down only slightly, Mencken wrote unvaliantly that “the blame for whatever happens rests with Roosevelt, it seems to me, far more than on Hitler.”122